"Well, I can report to you, in general, that the Justices looked well rested and rather pleased at the look of the new Court. This morning's session was spirited with all of the Justices asking questions and a couple of them smiling rather broadly at the sight of Justice Scalia tearing into the attorneys arguing their cases."
"Okay. What about the upcoming term? What cases can we look forward to?"
"Well, you know, Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote that, in the United States, almost every pressing social question eventually reaches the Supreme Court. And while last term was an unusual blockbuster of a year, this term is no slouch either."
"Later this month, the Court will hear what is probably the last broad based challenge to the death penalty. The Court must decide if capital punishment should be invalidated if statistics show that it's imposed disproportionately more often on blacks than on whites, or more often on the killers of whites than on the killers of blacks. The decision in this case, will have an enormous impact on the more than 1,700 men and women currently on death row."
"Last year, the Court issued major decisions in the affirmative action area. What about this year?"
"Well, last year, the Court ruled than affirmative action is generally acceptable in hiring, but not in lay-offs. This year, the Court will focus its attention on affirmative action in promotions and when that kind of affirmative action, if ever, is permissible. The Court will also hear a major sex discrimination case involving pregnancy. At issue is a California law that requires all employers to provide women up to four months disability leave for pregnancy. A California bank is challenging the law, claiming that it discriminates against men who do not get that kind of disability leave when they are ill. The bank claims that the California law violates a federal law which bans any sort of discrimination based on pregnancy. Then, there's another case that involves the federal law banning discrimination against the handicapped in employment. The question in this case is whether people who have a communicable disease, like AIDS or tuberculosis, can be denied jobs because of their disease. In this case, a school system fired a teacher who had tuberculosis."
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